Data, Licence, and Citation
How Seahorse ID data is collected, protected, and may be used.
Licence
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0)
Sighting data published on this portal may be used, copied, and adapted for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as you credit the source.
Photographs remain the property of the people who submitted them. To use a photo outside of research, please contact us first.
How to Cite
If you use this data in a publication, report, or thesis, please use one of the formats below.
Whole dataset
Ecoway Conservation. (2026). Seahorse ID: Syngnathidae sighting records from Bali. Accessed 7 October 2026, from https://ecoway.id/seahorse-id
A single record
Ecoway Conservation. (2026). Seahorse ID, record SW-2026-0001. https://ecoway.id/seahorse-id/sightings/SW-2026-0001
Location Precision
Coordinates shown and downloaded publicly are deliberately rounded to about one kilometre. Seahorses (Hippocampus spp.) are listed under CITES Appendix II and are vulnerable to collection, so publishing exact points could put populations at risk.
Researchers who need precise coordinates may request them with an explanation of the intended research. We assess each request individually.
Data Quality and Limitations
- Every record is reviewed by our team before publication, including a check of the identification against the submitted photos.
- The data is opportunistic: it comes from chance encounters rather than systematic surveys. An absence of records at a site does not mean the animals are absent there.
- Records cluster around popular dive sites, simply because that is where divers spend most of their time.
- Species names are a best effort. Syngnathidae are notoriously hard to identify in the field, especially telling pipefish from ghost pipefish.
Need fuller data?
For research collaboration, requests for precise coordinates, or contributing this data to global biodiversity databases such as OBIS and GBIF, please get in touch.
Contact Ecoway